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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I think it is one of those situations where everyone complains about what they use.
The reality is that system startup is insanely complicated due to the nature of software dependencies, and there will never be a perfect solution across multiple distros.
Lot's of things in computing should be simplified. Especially bios firmware / boot process. It has become overly complicated mess offering zero value for anybody. In 10 years the bios chip size has increased from 8 mbit to 256 mbit and no features added. Only TPM 2.0 has been added, but it is another chip than bios.
Haven't you heard? The UEFI bios can have binaries included by the board manufacturer that Windows will ask for and automatically run on startup... for example to download a GigaByte control center installer to fill your recent install with crapware... that would then proceed to download a self-update from a http (no-s) URL. And the binaries will work even if they're signed with revoked certificates and have been injected by any device with DMA access!
That's... like... super cool, isn't it? If only we could have that on Linux... /s
Also, the modern bioses have pretty graphics and mouse support... /s/s
No, it's not bad.
tbh, I've always like Apple's launchd.
Getting a "control center" for your init, with user groups, modularity, memory limits and queryable status/control is great. (Sometime people forget how painful init scripts can be...)
The only problem I see is the tendency to cram everything into systemd.
As a guy that's been installing Linux since you had to compile network drivers and adjust the init scripts to use them; SystemD rocks.
SystemD is blamed for long boot times
That is and always was nonsense. Systemd shortens boot times by starting things in parallel. That's one of its key features.
There are some things to note about that:
Systemd only starts services in parallel when it isn't told otherwise by Before and/or After settings in the service files. This makes it pretty easy to make systemd slow by misconfiguring it. You can use the systemd-analyze program to see which services held up your boot.
Systemd has a very long default timeout (90 seconds) for starting or stopping a service. It's appropriate for the big, lumbering servers that systemd was probably designed for, but it might be wise to shorten the timeout on desktops, where a service taking more than 5 seconds to start is almost certainly broken. It's a setting in /etc/systemd/system.conf.
Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?
I'm an early adopter of systemd. I installed it on my Debian desktops pretty much as soon as it was available in Debian, and I later started moving servers to it as well. I had long been jealous of Windows NT's service manager, and systemd is exactly what I had hoped would come to Linux one day.
Yes, the rant you're talking about is old, and yes, systemd is better now than it was then, but not in the sense of what the rant was complaining about. The rant was already patent nonsense when it was written, which has given me a very dim view of the anti-systemd crowd.
Besides systemd proper, they also spent a lot of time ranting about the journal system, which redirects syslog entries into a set of binary log files. They complained that this would make logs impossible to read in emergencies. This isn't even close to being true—any emergency bootable Linux image worth its salt has a copy of journalctl on it—and the binary nature of systemd's logs has caused me serious problems on exactly zero occasions.
Yes. Yes it is. systemd isn't bad for boot times, but more for tying so many goddamn things to init, PID1, creating just about the best attack point one could ever ask for. Wayland not being ready can be solved by not using it for the time being. Just use X. Also, it's still called plymouth.
I make plymouth do the verbose mode because it's cool and hacker-y. Also I like when it says "failed" and I know what failed. For a few weeks I kept having to manually start firewalld and I never would have known otherwise, update seems to have fixed that though.
Tbf, I really only have experience with fedora and thus systemd, so, I like it but I "don't know what I'm missing" in a sense.
I'm honestly a big fan. Systemd-init has tons of options like run targets, sandbox options, users you want things to run as, etc. System-oomd has tons of qol stuff for desktop users to help with stutter and responsiveness. I am also kind of excited for UKI that systemd-boot is set to support.